Conan Exiles

An open-world survival game set in the brutal lands of Conan the Barbarian! You are an exile, one of thousands cast out to fend for themselves in a barbaric wasteland swept by terrible sandstorms. Here you must fight to survive, build and dominate. PC Early Access summer 2016.

Winter 2016 Quarterly Update

In our very first quarterly update of 2016, you`ll be able to take to the skies of Central Tyria, do battle against a deadlier Shatterer, organize your squad with map markers and promotions, summon an old friend to fight beside you in Stronghold & celebrate traditional Lunar New Year...

Play Guild Wars 2 for free

Guild Wars 2 takes a revolutionary approach to online worlds by focusing on your journey – the things you do, the people you meet, and the experiences you have every day – not a race to a destination.

The press embargo was finally broken for The Elder Scrolls Online, and their reactions largely seemed to match those of players ignoring the NDA of the closed beta weeks earlier.

The general complaint is that it feels too stripped down and on the rails to be a true Elder Scrolls game, and too MMO-typical to really make an impact in the scene. All in all, it’s created dangerously low levels of excitement for a game that requires a lot of passion for players to deal with its steep costs.

I was not in the press beta, so I’ll point you to their critiques about gameplay and such, but I think that above all else, the pricing model is going to be an enormous problem for TESO, and that’s something that can still be changed, while there really isn’t all that much time to add or alter in-game content before it’s launch in April. For better or worse, most of the game is probably set in stone at this point, and many changes will have to be made after launch.

But the pricing model? It doesn’t have to be.

In January we wrote a piece predicting that The Elder Scrolls Online was going to be the biggest video game disaster of the year. I wasn’t lambasting the game itself necessarily, as I’m sure there will be plenty of worse games out this year. It’s the combination of being a relatively average game, ie. one that doesn’t generate much excitement, with extremely high costs for players. When I wrote that piece there were rumors that TESO’s budget was $200M, but even if it was half that, they would still need legions of fans pumped enough to spend full price on the game, shell out for the monthly subscription fee, and pay for in-game microtransactions.

Right now, the cost of playing The Elder Scrolls Online is too high for many players, even fans of past games in the series. There’s a $60 up front cost for the game, then a $15 a month subscription to play at any level. That’s $240 for the first year alone before taxes (and microtransactions). For one game.

Very few games can command that sort of fan commitment, and the Elder Scrolls may have been able to pull that off if the game was simply incredible. But from these fan and press accounts, it’s just alright, and average games do not convince players to spend $240 on them, much less $60, much of the time.

I don’t think Bethesda/Zenimax made The Elder Scrolls Online cost money up front, have a monthly subscription fee and have microtransactions because they’re simply trying to greedily grab all the cash they can. I think it’s because their budget for this game probably is pretty steep, even though they won’t admit it, and they view this as the only way to make that back. But that plan was reliant on the game being universally heralded as worthwhile and fantastic, and it just isn’t happening.

I am sure the game designers tried to make the best Elder Scrolls MMO they could, but the very concept of an MMO is antithetical to the “you’re the one true hero of the land, go explore anywhere and everywhere” idea of the past games in the series. There’s only so much they can do within the MMO framework and they almost had to lose a lot of what made The Elder Scrolls what it was.

But now it’s time to address the reality of the situation created by the decision this game should exist in the first place. Fans are not convinced it’s worth the cost. I simply do not think that Bethesda/Zenimax are going to get away with this pricing model, and if they stick to it, they’re going to be in worse trouble than if they’d adapted to the changing winds.

The way I see it, TESO should choose whether they want to charge $60 up front and have it be free-to-play, or charge $15 a month, but have it be downloadable for free or cheap (and preferably have less microtransactions).

It’s an old argument that TESO should go free to play, and $60 per copy is nothing to sneeze at. Skyrim sold 20 million $60 copies, and has been one of gaming’s biggest hits the past decade. No, it’s not 10 million players giving Blizzard $15 a month like WoW at its peak, but it’s still pretty damn good, even if TESO’s numbers don’t match Skyrim’s (which they wouldn’t).

But as TESO is determined to stay a subscription-based game at least in its launch window, I think perhaps now a better idea would be to eliminate the up front cost of the game. Keeping that $60 cost seems to me like they’re expecting players not to like the game past the first month or so, and it’s in place to ensure that they’re at least making something from it, even if the player cancels right away.

Perhaps from TESO’s point of view, bowing to pressure to change either of these pricing systems would look like they’re admitting defeat before the game is even released. Maybe they think that it would be an admission the game isn’t that great, or worth the price.

The fact is, nearly no games are worth that price. $240 to play one game over the course of one year is an outdated model that only works for a very, very select few well-established MMOs. An Elder Scrolls MMO exactly as TESO appears would probably have been all the rage five, six or seven years ago, but now? It feels instantly outdated, as does its pricing model. It’s even weirder to think it’s being applied to a console game, as those sort of players have never had to deal with any such game requiring an online subscription on top of what they already pay for Xbox Live or PS Plus.

Bethesda/Zenimax would be smart to at least try and adapt to the times. Yes, they should focus on fixing fan complaints with the game itself, and that should be priority one, but they also need to realize they’re going to have to get players playing in the first place, and the costs they have in place are just too prohibitive right now. Yes, there will be a select contingent of players who will buy and subscribe to the game no matter what, but at this rate, I think that’s going to be a much smaller enclave than they’d like.

I do believe at this rate, The Elder Scrolls Online is destined to have an incredibly rough launch, and they’ll be quickly forced into the sorts of changes I’m suggesting here, rather than having the chance to make those decisions willingly. I do not want TESO to fail, but I think it’s been a hard road from concept to execution to marketing to pricing, and all those elements are conspiring to throw up enormous barriers to success for the game.